Your pioneering polar expeditions have taken you to some of the most remote places on Earth. What inspired you to establish White Desert, and what did you originally hope to achieve?
The dream of White Desert started back in 2005 while on an expedition with friends to traverse Antarctica. We were doing the equivalent of a double marathon a day, pulling sledges for 80 days in minus 30 degrees. While stuck in a tent with a blizzard raging outside, we began to daydream about what the perfect camp in Antarctica would look like, with amazing food, soft linen sheets, basically everything we were missing.
After 10 years of exploring, I realised the one thing I really knew about was Antarctica, and the ‘deep field’ in particular – the vast, remote, untouched interior that few people get to see besides scientists and explorers.
So I bought three tents, worked with a science outfit flying old Russian planes to Antarctica and built a little camp. It grew and grew from there. Now we have one of the biggest logistical hubs in Antarctica, with 120 staff across 18 nationalities. When I first started going, more people had climbed Everest in a single day than had been to the South Pole. Now things have changed, but it’s still one hell of an adventure.
Building a world-class travel operation at the bottom of the world is an extraordinary undertaking. What are some of the greatest obstacles you have to overcome?
There’s a good reason why we’re the only ones doing what we do – it’s incredibly difficult. Landing aircraft on runways made of ice is extremely technical. As is moving fuel from the coast to the interior.
For example, when an icebreaker carrying fuel arrives at the coast, it’s confronted with a 28m ice cliff. We lift 20,000 litres of fuel with a crane and lower it onto a convoy, which then drives 600km across an ice sheet using ground-penetrating radar to check for crevasses. And that’s just to get the fuel to the runway.
Today White Desert offers a range of signature experiences, from observing emperor penguin chicks to reaching the South Pole. What can clients expect from a White Desert journey?
A lot of our clients are very accomplished travellers, but we show them something they’ve never seen before; a completely different realm. We don’t have mountains and valleys like in the Alps; we have an ice cap with protrusions like monoliths, some of them towering 3,000 feet high. During his stay with us, astronaut Buzz Aldrin called it “more like the surface of the moon than anything else on Earth” – a conversation that inspired the retro-futuristic, lunar-esque design of our Echo Camp, where floor-to-ceiling windows frame a vast, surreal wilderness.
A huge part of what we do is connecting people to nature. You have to pay attention to what the weather is doing. Flights and plans change; that’s just a function of being in Antarctica. The environment dictates what’s going to happen, a reversal from modern life that’s very humbling. You become the passenger, made to connect with the environment in a way that really centres people. You don’t sit in your cruise-ship cabin, then go on a zodiac, touch Antarctica and come back. You are in the deep fields of the continent. There’s a very big difference.
Many of our clients are aiming to get to the South Pole. We’ll get you there, but more importantly we’ll get you there safely. A vast amount of money, effort, resources and technical know-how go into making our operation really safe. Sure, we’ll push you out of your comfort zone, but everyone’s comfort zone is relative to them. You don’t need to be a double marathon runner or a polar explorer.
If you’ve never done ice climbing before, we’ll teach you how to do it in Antarctica. We’ve world-class high-mountain guides and a staff-to-guest ratio of 17 to 12. The activities we offer are amazing, from standing among emperor penguins to hiking through electric-blue ice tunnels, hidden beneath the Antarctic surface. You needn’t be a world-class athlete, but you will get a taste of polar exploration. And you’ll get to be the hero of your very own adventure.
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Why choose a White Desert adventure over a traditional Antarctic cruise?
Around 100,000 people a year visit Antarctica by cruise ship. There’s a seismic difference between what we offer and that experience. We are on the other side of Antarctica where no cruise ships ever go because it’s a 10-day sail to get down to us. It’s a five-hour flight from Cape Town to our runway, as opposed to a two-day crossing of the Drake Passage from Ushuaia, where seas are famously rough. Where we operate is incredibly remote. There are unnamed mountains around us that have never been climbed. We’re still discovering new things after 20 years of being there.
The other difference is we host just 400 clients a year, with no more than 12 guests in a camp at any one time. A true sense of discovery can only be felt when there’s a small number of people. When we take you to the emperor penguin colony at Atka Bay, just 45 minutes from our camp, it’s just you and 20,000 penguins. That’s a very different experience to 100 guests landing by zodiac and seeing a rookery of 50 chinstrap penguins. Our experiences are right on your doorstep. We have cathedral-size ice caves a mere 200m from our camp. That’s the difference. We’re in the deep field; it’s a completely different landscape.
Operating in one of the world’s most fragile environments brings serious responsibility. How does White Desert balance access with protection, and what does genuine sustainability leadership look like in practice?
Environmental protection has been a huge part of our operation since inception. We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007, long before it was popular, and were the first people ever to use sustainable aviation fuel in Antarctica. Plus the camps themselves have been built with no foundations, so they can be removed without a trace.
All plastics have been eliminated from our supply chain, and we’ve just spent about half-a-million dollars on solar panels. Vast parts of our camps, our operations, heating and electrical processes are solar-powered, which makes perfect sense given the 24-hour sunshine. We keep our operations really small – 12 people in each camp – and have incredibly tight environmental policies, so our footprint is minimal. That’s the way we’ve always operated and the way it should be. We’re custodians of this land. Caring for it is our responsibility.
Beyond the journeys themselves, you’ve established the White Desert Foundation, which supports vital Antarctic scientific research and Blue Carbon restoration. Tell us about these key areas of impact and your successes to date.
Firstly, there’s actual scientific work that we fund in Antarctica. For instance, we’ve been supporting scientists from Australia conducting meteorite research, as well as ongoing research on climate change.
We also invest in ‘blue carbon’ projects near our base in South Africa, focusing on degraded salt marshes and peat wetlands along the Western Cape coastline. When healthy, such sites remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere at a much faster rate than tropical forests and can store approximately three to five times more carbon per acre. Funding projects like this not only creates jobs in South Africa, it means that as a company, we’re actually carbon positive.
Your latest operation, the Dr Jones Collection, offers small-group journeys in South America, flying just 12 guests from lodge to lodge in a fully refurbished DC-3 aircraft. What does the Dr Jones journey entail?
I wanted to bring travel back to how it used to be. In the old days, you would take your suitcase, walk across the tarmac, say “hello” to the pilot and board the plane. We wanted to bring that golden age back where you dress up, drink a martini… it’s a glamorous way to travel, right?
We took DC-3 Baslers – iconic propeller planes with a super-vintage feel – and spent $11 million on their total refurbishment. Flying today, we’ve all become conditioned to travelling at 40,000 feet. So you shut the window because there’s nothing to see. Imagine being on a plane where you’re flying low across a jungle, looking out the window at a smouldering volcano and asking the pilot, “Can we do a loop around that?” That’s how flying used to be, and that’s what we do.
Next we add a sense of adventure. In the Peru-to-Patagonia journey, we don’t go to Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley where there’s a thousand other people; we go to Chachapoyas to visit the Gocta Cataracts Waterfall, which was only discovered in 2002. No one ever goes there because it’s so remote and inaccessible, but it’s 2,000-feet high and utterly spectacular. We hack through the cloud forest, find actual mummies in sarcophagi and explore on horseback. Two days later you’re flying hot-air balloons above the Atacama Desert. Three days after that, you’re in the ice of Patagonia.
What else is on the horizon for Dr Jones and White Desert?
We just launched a new Colombia-to-Guatemala Dr Jones itinerary. Again, the diversity of the landscape is insane. You’re going from jungles into the savannah with capybaras and riding with the cowboys of Los Llanos in Colombia. Then it’s off to Providencia, a remote island surrounded by one of the largest reefs in the Caribbean, before visiting the Mayan pyramids of Guatemala. And that’s all in a single adventure. It’s mind-boggling.
Then in four weeks, we’re flying across the old ‘High Arctic’ route from Notting Hill to New York, taking in Scotland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and New York. The Basler means we can fly directly into some incredibly remote parts of Greenland and Iceland.
In Antarctica we’re launching a new camp next year. And just a few months ago we launched our Explorer Camp, which offers heated pods with ski-chalet-style interiors. It’s what Captain Scott would have dreamed about on his expedition south.
Finally, if you had to pick one memory that best captures the essence of Antarctica for you, what would it be?
When I first landed in Antarctica ready to ski to the South Pole, I walked away from camp onto this rocky outcrop and just stared across the expanse, knowing that the pole lay somewhere out there. The sheer scale of Antarctica. This otherworldly landscape. It was incredibly daunting and humbling. That sense of awe has never left me.
Images copyright to White Desert
